Snowden a Hero to Americans

He’s been portrayed in the mainstream media as a "narcissist," a
scheming "traitor," an agent of Russia, a Chinese spy, a clueless
high school drop out, an anti-government "extremist," and I’m quite
sure I must’ve missed a few of the more exotic epithets. I’m talking about EdwardSnowden, of course, the former CIA employee and NSA contractor whose leaking
to the Guardian has exposed a vastglobalspyingapparatus secretly constructed
by Washington. The weeks-long Hate aimed at Snowden reached its apogee when
prominent "journalists" started going after the reporters who broke
the Snowden story, principally Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, inferring
that it was Greenwald and the Guardian who put Snowden up to penetrating
the NSA. These aren’t just wingnut bloggers we’re dealing with here, but two
prominent legacy-media reporters: David "Meet the Press" Gregory and
Walter Pincus, of the Washington Post. When Gregory demanded to know
why Greenwald shouldn’t be prosecuted alongside Snowden, that was the Establishment
baring its teeth.

One should never assume their bark is worse than their bite, but clearly this
display of anger is born of sheer frustration. Snowden, after all, has thrown
our rulers and their court jesters in the media on the defensive. Not since
David bopped Goliath on the noggin has a single individual landed such a decisive
blow on a giant, unwieldy bully. Washington is reeling from the impact of the
Snowden revelations, not just on the internationalplane but on the home front
as well. In spite of battalions of politicians of both parties dutifully denouncing
the NSA leaker as a modern day Benedict Arnold, and weeks of media hysteria
over the alleged "damage" he has done to our national security, the
American people aren’t buying the Official Narrative: a recent Quinnipiac poll
reports:

"American voters say 55 – 34 percent that Edward Snowden is a whistle-blower,
rather than a traitor, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released
today. In a massive shift in attitudes, voters say 45 – 40 percent the government’s
anti-terrorism efforts go too far restricting civil liberties, a reversal from
a January 14, 2010, survey by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University
when voters said 63 – 25 percent that such activities didn’t go far enough to
adequately protect the country. Almost every party, gender, income, education,
age and income group regards Snowden as a whistle-blower rather than a traitor."

This poll tracks several interesting trends, the most arresting of which is
the utter unanimity with which the American people are rejecting the Official
Narrative on Snowden – that Snowden is a traitor who committed espionage and
deserves to be punished for his "crime." Weeks and weeks of relentless
smearing, accusing him of collusion with America’s enemies, and worse, have
simply had no effect – other than, perhaps, to increase his approval
ratings!

As was the case in the former Soviet Union, where people took the truth to
be the opposite of whatever appeared in the newspapers, the American people
are simply tuning out the "mainstream" media. In the upside down Bizarro
World they find themselves living in, Americans have resorted to the only reliable
method of determining truth from falsehood: by simply inverting whatever the
Establishment media is "reporting." They’re telling us Snowden’s a
"traitor": ergo, he’s a heroic whistle-blower. A crude but very effective
methodology, one that – if applied consistently – can have some pretty interesting
implications down the road.

The great shift in voter attitudes toward civil liberties is worth going into
specifics: the partisan breakdown is particularly interesting. While 49 percent
of Republicans support the NSA’s phone dragnet program, the number rises to
58 percent when we’re talking about Democrats. Opposition is centered in Independents,
Republicans, and males. 56 percent of Republicans say the dragnet is too much
of an intrusion into privacy, while only 40 percent of Democrats agree.

The evolution of American liberalism from a pro-civil liberties stance to one
that effectively disappears the Fourth Amendment because Government Is Our Friend
is here charted and measured. Yes, you’re right that they might not be telling
the pollsters this if a Republican was in the White House, but I would argue
this shift was bound to happen anyway. After all, haven’t "progressives"
been telling us for years that conservative-libertarian fears of Big Government
are just paranoid alarmism? Aren’t Democrats the "Mommy" party, which
sees government as the Great Protector – and doesn’t the demographic breakdown,
which shows women much more conducive to the Surveillance State than men, tell
us where Democratic strategists are placing their bets? Indeed, one is hard
put to come up with a reason for liberals to stand with Snowden in an age when
"We’re from the government, and we’re here to help" is the leitmotif and motto of American "progressivism."

Old-fashioned American liberals never believed in any such claptrap. The Midwestern
"progressives" of yesteryear didn’t cotton to centralization, and
saw government regulation as the instrument of corporate control as much as
a shield against it. They didn’t trust Washington bureaucrats, and although
they initially supported the New Deal they turned against FDR when he started
accruing more power in the alphabet soup of government agencies set up during
the Depression. They stood up during the McCarthy era, when the threat to our
civil liberties was almost as great as it is today, and they fought government
repression tooth and nail. Today, that noble tradition persists in the ACLU,
and a few other organizations, mostly legal defense groups, but politically
the old-fashioned liberals are in decline, as the Quinnipiac poll suggests,
with the center of opposition to the Surveillance State shifting to the libertarian-conservative
side of the spectrum.

In the short term, this is good news for libertarians, such as myself, who
have been campaigning for years to convert conservatives to the cause of constitutional
government and a non-interventionist foreign policy. The latter is involved,
at least tangentially, because the rationalization for universal surveillance
hinges on the need to protect us from the consequences of our dangerously wrong-headed
policy of perpetual war. To those of us who lived – and suffered – through the
Bush years, that significantly more Republicans than Democrats see Snowden as
a whistleblower rather than a "traitor" is an astonishing fact.

On the other hand, this is very bad news for the country in the long
term. A healthy American liberalism – that is, a movement dedicated to the preservation
of our civil liberties against a government ever-eager to infringe on them –
is absolutely necessary if the Constitution is to be successfully defended.
In the absence of such a movement, it becomes politically impossible to fight
off attempts by both the Obama cult and the neocons to impose a universal surveillance
regime in the US. Unless old-fashioned liberalism undergoes a revival on account
of the Snowden revelations, civil liberties in this country are doomed. Neither
the left nor the right alone can save the Constitution: a united effort is needed
if we are going to defeat the new authoritarians.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

You can check out my Twitter feed by going here.
But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often
made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.

Author: Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].

"On the other hand, this is very bad news for the country in the long term. A healthy American liberalism – that is, a movement dedicated to the preservation of our civil liberties against a government ever-eager to infringe on them – is absolutely necessary if the Constitution is to be successfully defended."

Absolutely! And the ONLY thing that could possibly bring American liberals back to the side of civil liberties and a healthy scepticism of government overreach would be the election of a swaggering evangelical cowboy from Texas…or someone like him. But then suddenly all the republicans (except the libertarians) would lose their new found concern for civil liberties. It's like a trap isn't it?

Sam Lowry

"Presidents don't have power; their job is to draw attention away from it."–Ford Prefect

Johnny in Wi.

I read a lot of comment sections of blogs. I am shocked how many people who were big on the security state have defended Snowden. This is especially true on rightwing sites. There are still honest liberals who are disgusted with Obama and his regime. May their numbers grow and multiply.

Chris Randolph

"Honest liberals" haven't been behind the Democratic party in decades. Show me an Obama supporter – now, in 2012 or in 2008 – and I'll show you a person neither honest nor liberal.

ralph

Small movements of secession is the indicator that opinion is changing. I read where there is a small
movement like this in northern Colorado. As this gains strength, there will be more movements.
Ultimately the solution is the breakup of the U.S. and the dismantling of the federal government.
Elections and parties are old school. Self governance or individualism is the ideology of the future.
The collectivism solutions of the past must be discarded and that includes the Constitution..

musings

I always wonder about the motives behind seemingly radical movements. Lately, I have been hearing Canadian voices all charged up about the Quebec train explosions declaring that this means we need the Keystone Pipeline (through the Ogallala Aquifer in the US).

What form of government would be best for protecting that and other irreplaceable resources, in this case from pollution by giant oil spills which will happen from time to time if it is built? Obviously, Canada is a nation which stands to gain from the development of tar sands, but are we? Who can protect the giant redwoods from Asians who want to buy them to make furniture?

If the country is not up to economic depredation and selling itself cheap to pressuring nations around the world, because it is now little regional entities in need of quick cash, is that a good trade? Hadn't we better make the union answerable? Hadn't we better force the Constitution to be observed? Hadn't we better throw the bums out and install better people?

Secession in the South was looking down the road not like a confederacy but further fragmentation, and even possible empire building with Mexico as the prize. That history is not so far away in terms of either human nature or the geographic realities of the region which seceded.

musings

That's "if the country is 'now' up to economic depredation" (because of splitting up)

ralph

Musings, your "musings"are just that. Without a federal government, there would be no public
property. Property rights would address your musings and the price system would allocate
these resources better than the "better" people you want to install. Also using the Constitution
to "force" is anathema to property rights.

musings

The industrial age, for good or for ill, has a mix of property rights and community resources. You are suggesting a system with a nobility which can somehow be expected never to sell the redwoods or pollute the Ogallala Aquifer in the interest of its own personal posterity. I think Mr. Jefferson, who lived in the midst a system where he was indeed lord of the manor, decided against primogeniture for Virginia and wanted the ownership to be held more broadly. The effects of industrialization, which even he did not foresee entirely, introduced a stream of events which had to be managed by more people than the initial site where something was manufactured. And though I do not like our current leaders or how they interpret their powers, I do not think it wise to return to a system where everything is for the 1% at the top and we are going to have to trust them.

I am completely with you, ralph. As long as Washington has the amount of power it currently exploits, it will always try to maintain and expand its reach through intimidation and violence. The US needs to break up into individual states and, with hope, embrace neutrality like Switzerland.

Chris Randolph

Here's the thing, though: Corporations are now bigger and stronger than national governments. If you think things are bad now, split into 50 little republics and see how fast your new little republic-state becomes Honduras.

ralph

Chris, governments operate on the principles and force and coercion. Corporations operate
on voluntary exchange and need to satisfy their customer. The difference is massive.
I do not see the relevance of your comment.

Chris Randolph

Corporations operate on the need to satisfy their stockholders. 'Voluntary exchange' is hilarious. Take away the government no-bid contracts, the extortion and the fraud and there'd hardly be any corporate activity left in the economy.

GStorm

While the liberal support for spying on citizens is disheartening, I wouldn't be too quick to call the old liberals an endangered species. All the ones I know who pay attention to anything going on in the world beyond them are strongly opposed (I live in both California and Massachusetts). It's mostly the squishy middle that supports this and the Huffpost comment crowd, which is widely made up if people who work for the Demicratic Party in one way or another.

JLS

"It's mostly the squishy middle that supports this and the Huffpost comment crowd…"

Boy is this ever true!!!

I've been over there checking the comments on the Snowden related articles and its amazing how the people who were outraged over the patriot act and Bush era abuses of government power are totally ok with it as long as a democrat is president. If Obama suddenly announced he was making abortion illegal and homosexuality would bring a prison sentence some of them would still find a way to justify it.

Mr. Jonz

Politics is like sports to some people. As long as their team wins all is good. It's all their tiny brains can comprehend.

MetaCynic

I think that politics is something more sinister than mere sports. I would suggest that political parties and their partisans are more like street gangs flashing their colors and scrawling their insipid slogans to identify turf and intimidate rivals. All this sound and fury over trivia is incomprehensible drivel to outsiders who see no meaningful differences among the various players. They're all just gangsters terrorizing the neighborhood. Same with politicians. They're all just power hungry thieves and liars trying to set themselves apart from the 'other' based on a few soundbites and meaningless slogans.

I wish there were an explanation for old liberals Feinstein, Pelosi, Markey [he knew about it all, but now is "concerned"] and Warren [who feigns "shock"].

Chris Randolph

How are the likes of Feinstein and Pelosi describable as 'liberal'?

El Tonno

Pod People!

El Tonno

"The father-thing had stuffed it down in the very bottom of the barrel. Among the old leaves and torn-up cardboard, the rotting remains of magazines and curtains, rubbish from the attic his mother had lugged down here with the idea of burning someday. It still looked a little like his father enough for him to recognize. He had found it — and the sight made him sick at his stomach. He hung onto the barrel and shut his eyes until finally he was able to look again. In the barrel were the remains of his father, his real father. Bits the father-thing had no use for. Bits it had discarded.

He got the rake and pushed it down to stir the remains. They were dry. They cracked and broke at the touch of the rake. They were like a discarded snake skin, flaky and crumbling, rustling at the touch. An empty skin. The insides were gone. The important part. This was all that remained, just the brittle, cracking skin, wadded down at the bottom of the trash barrel in a little heap. This was all the father-thing had left; it had eaten the rest. Taken the insides — and his father's place."

richard vajs

Sometimes, disaster is good for a country. Our humiliating defeat in VietNam led to a temporary distrust in militarism during the Carter years, but unfortunately, then along came the Horsesh-t Cowboy with his brave killing of Ghadafi's kid and his invasion of Grenada and a totally unnecessary build-up of the military again. Maybe, this time, these intrusions into everyone's lives plus all the waste in Iraq and Afghanistan will have a much longer, lingering effect.

Cold Wind

Yep! Snowden's a hero. On the other hand, the architects of the New Surveillance State (NSA), Keith Alexander, the NIA's James R, Clapper, et al should be in jail. They took an oath to 'uphold the Constitution' and didn't!

Wolfgang9

Since the Berlin wall came down and the crashing of the "Status quo" (the counter balance Soviet Union) US politics become more and more Fascist. Before 1990 I thought the politics of the US would be the better choice for all human kind around the globe. Then came the war in Yugoslavia which put a first dent in my thinking. But the real change for me was the treatment of the chess champion Bobby Fischer who was hunted around the globe until he found a short asylum in Iceland. About four years later he was killed, probably by CIA or Moss… An the I really knew, this system will hit everybody who is a danger to it and there is NO REAL FREEDOM of opinion and everything will be just fine which ensures the Big Brother rule of the world. Today it is Snowden, a youg guy I admire, yesterday it was Wikileaks Assange and Manning who acted couragesly and hopefully will be remembered if people are ever successful in stopping what is going on now, the enslavery of the common man by some self elected crooks.

Wolfgang9

Just as a reminder for some: The war against Yugoslavia was not really directed against Yugoslavia, it was directed against Russia! That was just a show to impress what was left of Russia that it would have no chance to resist the newly created empire. Since first WWar Serbia was connected to Russia and it was a huge problem for Russia if they could not save Serbia.
So that war was a demonstration of force.

muggles

A sad meta observation about the consequences of the massive spying programs run by NSA and its better known armed organs (CIA, FBI, DEA, ICE, et al.) is that it is based upon the assumption that the mass of American citizens are potential traitors and terrorists, subversives all. This reflects the Statsi, KGB world view. Our Constitutional rights are relics of the past.
When governments treat their citizens as criminals to be spied upon and manipulated, lied to, etc. then it will soon get what it expects. "Arab spring" uprisings over oppressive fascist type regimes can happen anywhere, especially when we are all now "terrorists" at loose in the eyes of our State.

Informative article. If the US were a democracy, we could have a vote on whether Obama should continue to Don Corleone the world into depriving Snowden of human rights. Alas, it is not, so Obama continues to disobey any law he feels like to try to get him. However, the more laws he breaks to try to get Snowden, the more he shows the world what a monster he is and that Snowden needs everyone's help.

ralph

Please Empire Slayer, learn that democracy is an evil form of collectivism. Promoting an election
to put your team in just means tyranny shifts from one party to the other. As for your comment,
the world will not become enlightened until the U.S. federal government is dismantled and the 50
states secede and subdivide into many decentralized units where individualism can prosper
and a vote based on voluntary exchange and open competition is primary.

Monster from the Id

Ralph's ideas might work…on some other planet, with some other species besides humans.

To be fair, I went through a Libertarian phase, when I believed similar things.

However, "Aunt Rosalie" was right–life is NOT like that.

ralph

Who or what is "Aunt Rosalie?"

Monster from the Id

A Libertarian who DOESN'T recognize an Ayn Rand trope?

I guess there had to be one somewhere… :)

I got rid of my Rand books long ago, but in one of them, she wrote about "the voice of your Aunt Rosalie, saying 'Life is not like that.' "

Oswaldwasalefty

I see the partisan reaction to the Snowden Affair as another chapter in the decade long decline since the wonderful upsurge in the anti-war movement in the lead up to the Invasion of Iraq. That movement was killed off by the near universal support it lent to a reactionary Vietnam War apologist John Kerry in 2004. If Vietnam had been the sole election issue in that campaign, then I would have voted for the draft dodging Bush over the reactionary war monger Kerry.

Dull, and in the case of Romney outright abrasive, rich men from Massachusetts just don't play well to the masses in a national election. Hence, we got the second post-Carter smooth talking con man of more humble origins, this time from Chicago, to helm the Democrats retaking of the White House.

I didn't vote for either Obama or Romney, but I had hoped the ass-hole Romney would win over the "nice" guy Obama. We would not only be better citizens with a President Romney, as the street protests of 2003 during Bush, Jr. Time makes clear, but Romney couldn't possibly be as insufferable as Obama has been when it comes to burying the Bill of Rights and declaring himself a defacto Augustus. This is because you could more easily mobilize a popular opposition to him than you can with the insufferable Augustus Obama.

Chris Randolph

"I had hoped the ass-hole Romney would win over the "nice" guy Obama. We would not only be better citizens with a President Romney, as the street protests of 2003 during Bush, Jr. Time makes clear, but Romney couldn't possibly be as insufferable as Obama has been when it comes to burying the Bill of Rights and declaring himself a defacto Augustus"

YES YES YES

What was particularly disgusting was to hear Democrat apologists claim in the face of this complete logic that casting a comprised vote for Obama (as opposed to a minor party candidate) was intellectual "strategic" voting! Has there ever been a creature more pathetic than a loyal Democrat?

USAma Bin Laden

The thing about Snowden's revelations is that they are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of America's global spying.

What America is doing is really unprecedented in scale in that it seeks to a impose a planetary-wide surveillance system far surpassing anything in history. The Germany Stasi and Nazis before them have nothing on the "Land of the Free" when it comes to mass surveillance.